A modern telephone unit offers many features like memory, timer, hold, automatic re-dialing, mute, volume adjustment, speaker, answering system, etc. As people scattered throughout distant countries are better able to do business with one another due to modern air transportation and communication systems, a growing number of people are conducting business with countries spaced far and wide.
For example, consider a man working in a business office in the United States (U.S.A.) who often needs to call parties in different countries such as Indonesia, Venezuela or Sweden, etc. The caller will likely use a telephone directory to find the appropriate telephone country code. However, the caller preferably needs to know the exact local time of the caller's destination in order to place the call during business hours at the remote destination. Since it is often inconvenient or impossible to find a catalog of time differences of various countries, the caller is compelled to make a call blindly. Such a blind call often results in wasted time and money because the call is not made during normal business hours in the foreign country.
To make more cost efficient telephone calls, it is desirable to have a feature associated with the telephone which will provide information regarding the time in a distant country by entering the country code. A simultaneous display of a caller's local time and the specific time of the called country will better enable the caller to place the telephone call at an appropriate time so as to eliminate the need to search out the call destination time.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,887,251 issued to Takada shows a world timepiece that is not associated with a telephone which provides time and date information of areas in different time zones by inputting "area code" information. However the timepiece of Takada is wasteful of hardware because it uses a separate internal timepiece where each timepiece is dedicated to one of at least twenty-four time zones.
Therefore, in response to the foregoing problems, it is an object of the present invention to provide a cost effective international time indicating system using a single timepiece associated with a telephone to provide information regarding the specific time and date of the destination of a telephone call by means of entering the international access code followed by the country code and if necessary, followed by the area code.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a simultaneous display of the caller's local time and date and the time and date of the destination of the telephone call.